


chromatography

by 8611



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural, M/M, Mild Gore, Minor Injuries, Shapeshifting, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 03:49:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy has a perfectly boring, average life. Or he would, if you ignored the part where he's a witch, his best friend is dating an undead guy, and he's got a very peeved shapeshifter on his tail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	chromatography

**Author's Note:**

  * For [canistakahari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/canistakahari/gifts).



> Because canistakahari is a massive enabler, and I've never met an AU I don't love. Also, to the ASoIaF fans - skinchanger is used here in a different way than in the books, so no warging involved. 
> 
> Beta'd by the totally fabulous [spinningdust](http://spinningdust.tumblr.com/). <3!

When he’d been young and stupid enough to join a coven, one of them had asked him (and she spoke green, sparks in the air, because everything was woven of only half reality with her) why he was bothering applying to medical schools. 

“You’re already an incredibly gifted healer,” she had said, narrowing her eyes. “Why have any more interaction with the human world than you need?”

“We _are_ human,” he’d said, because he’d never understood why some witches insisted on divorcing themselves from what they actually were. 

Right now though, he’d love to remove himself from humanity entirely, because there’s a wedding invitation on his table from his ex and it would have been _their_ anniversary today, and he just can’t deal with that shit. 

He bangs on Uhura’s door, and when he doesn’t get an answer he sighs, rubbing at his face. He heads around the back of the house, jumping the low fence, and crashes his way through dying leaves into the forest behind the house, fumbling in his jacket pocket for cigarette and lighter. Uhura’s always on him about quitting (and he did, once, but then Joce handed him a thick packet from her lawyer and there went that), but he figures, what’s the use? He can heal his own body as well as anyone else’s, so he’s not exactly worried about dying of lung cancer before 50. 

The trees have mostly lost their leaves, and he stops on a rocky outcropping that drops down to a creek that’s little more than a trickle. He and Uhura have been coming out here for years, and when the snow melts it turns into a proper little river, but right now it’s sluggish and muddy. 

He drops down to the cool stone, crossing his legs, and shoves his free hand in his pocket, content to just sit and wallow in vague anger. Eventually his mind starts to wander, and he traces heartbeats through the forest, fast (prey) and slow (predators), all tied in with the trees, the ground, his own breathing. 

The cigarette burns downs eventually, and he snaps it between two fingers, watching as the fire curls around what’s left, smoke towards the sky and ash to the earth. He’s never been great with fire - water was always his thing - but you’re always going to be stronger with your opposite than one of the elements you’re adjacent to. McCoy’s never even tried messing with earth or wind, he’d probably just hurt himself. 

He stands up, dusting off his jeans and hands, when he feels something off at the back of his mind. Straightening up, he drops away his anger and annoyance and the cold, and picks out the heartbeats around him again, and there, at the edge of what he can feel, there’s something odd. It’s not animal, but it’s not human either. It’s also getting closer at an alarming rate. 

When McCoy’s just thinking that maybe it’s time to start running a mountain lion bursts through the underbrush across the little gorge, launching itself through the air and right at McCoy. He doesn’t have much time to think, just throws up his hands and stops it mere inches from his face, stalled in the air by cords of blue sparks so light they’re almost white, the air rippling around it. McCoy grits his teeth as the mountain lion snaps at him, trying to paw closer, and he can feel it pulling at him – totally not a normal mountain lion; there’s something under its shape that’s harsh and intelligent. Gotta be a shifter.

“You have one chance,” McCoy growls. “Turn.”

The shifter just pushes at him again, teeth snapping, and McCoy glares, twisting one wrist in response. The air snaps and then evens out, and a young man drops to the ground, landing on his stomach. McCoy staggers back, and something at the back of his head says _you idiot, you haven’t done anything that hard in years_ , which he can feel from the ringing in his ears and the fact that he’s suddenly incredibly exhausted. 

That’s why he’s a bit slow to react when the man picks himself and throws his body at McCoy, like he’s still an animal. McCoy lands on his back, breath knocked from his lungs, and the man is on him, clawing at his face and throat with blunt nails. 

“Shit-“ McCoy tries to grab his hands, his heart going a million miles an hour, and he winces when those nails, blunt or not, draw blood down his jaw and along his neck. They roll through the leaves, and it’s all McCoy can do to try to get his hands on the man and protect his own face. Blue eyes flash above him and McCoy finally manages to get his hands under the man’s chest and throw him back, a simple push that he can still manage. 

The man rolls off the edge of the outcropping, grabbing the stones and holding himself there, up on his arms, and he looks like he’s going to try to get back up. McCoy walks over, stands over him, and points one finger at him. 

“Don’t you fucking dare,” McCoy says, and hard, blue eyes that read fury never leave his face. McCoy knows he’s got the upper hand – he’s not going to be able to shift back for a bit, and he’s a total moron if he thinks he can win with human flesh against McCoy and the sparks that are swirling through his body, hyped on adrenaline. 

The shifter gives him one last long look, and then, with a growl, drops down to the mud of the creek before he goes running off, pale skin standing out against the grey and black trees. 

McCoy slumps to the ground, on his back, breathing hard. He’d been stupid to try that, but he supposes that he can forgive himself considering he was rather suddenly confronted with a homicidal mountain lion-slash-shifter. A shifter that had clearly gone wild, even. McCoy knows the signs when they spend too much time in a shifted form, when the animal starts chipping away at what’s human in a person. 

He finally gets his breathing under control, and, feeling like his limbs are made of absolute lead, drags himself upright. As he’s standing up, something catches his eye, and he reaches down to grab it. It’s a thin strip of dark leather that has a tooth strung on it, some sort of angry looking canine. 

“Oh, fuck.” 

That wasn’t a garden-variety shifter. That was a skinchanger, and McCoy’s now in possession of his talisman. He’s fucked. 

\---

He manages to make it back through the woods to Uhura’s, and he collapses on the swing on her front porch. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when he wakes up it’s dark and he’s in a bed. He groans, slowly becoming aware of the fact that his whole body is aching, fire licking through his veins. His mother had been the one to warn him about that, if you used too much energy on something you’d get your ass kicked by your opposite. He can’t imagine what it feels like to deal with the other three, but damn, does he know fire in his muscles and bones and mind. The first time he’d pushed himself too far he’d been 12 and ended up spending two days in bed. That first morning, that had been hell; he was sure his skin was burning off, peeling back like little more than paper. 

He sits up slowly, rubbing at his temples and pushing the fire down and out, long deep breaths, over and over again. When it subsides to something that doesn’t feel like it’s going to give him a migraine he finally takes stock of where he is, and recognizes Uhura’s extra bedroom pretty much right away. He also notices that Uhura’s put gauze over his scratches, and he can feel warmth under them. He smiles when he realizes that she’s used some of his own magic on him, wrapped up in what looks to be regular old disinfectant ointment until you notice it heals things disturbingly fast. Uhura’s pretty stocked up on the stuff. 

Uhura is downstairs in the kitchen, sitting at the island and paying more attention to the novel she’s reading than the food she’s eating. 

“Hey,” he says, voice rough, as he leans in the doorway, tucking his hands under his arms. “Sorry for falling asleep on your porch.”

“It’s fine,” she waves it away, closes the book and sets it down next to her plate. “What’d you do?”

“Forced a change on a skinchanger,” McCoy mutters, pushing off to come sit across from her. Uhura just whistles, long and low. 

“Well, that was a stupid thing to do,” she says. 

“I thought he was just a shifter when I did it,” McCoy sighs, shrugs. Uhura smirks, and he glares. 

“Lesson learned,” she says. “Does that have something to do with whatever is in your jacket?” 

The necklace had been pulling at the back of his mind since he’d picked it up, so he’s not shocked Uhura can feel it, across the house and upstairs. 

“Before I say anything, _I know_ ,” McCoy says, rubbing at his forehead. “It’s his talisman.”

“Wow, _monumentally_ stupid thing to do,” Uhura says. 

“I know, dammit.” 

“I’ll make coffee, you can tell me the whole story,” she says, and McCoy just sighs, dropping his head onto the counter with a bit of a _clunk_ and a wince. 

It’s not that he tries to search out trouble like this. In general, he hates trouble. In fact, he wouldn’t mind being totally normal, because it would mean a much more normal life. Instead he’s in a coven of two (and the other member has a bound spirit for a boyfriend, but he’s not going to go there right now), seems to attract stupid supernatural shit for a living, and now probably has a skinchanger stalking him with murderous intent. 

“My life wasn’t this horrible, once upon a time,” McCoy mutters when Uhura slides a mug across to him. He holds it between his palms, enjoying the warmth. He curls the steam around, making it form a perfect circle and Uhura smiles, blowing the shape out of whack. He looks up at her, eyes narrowed. 

“The word you’re looking for is interesting, not horrible.”

“You think it’s interesting, I think it’s insane.” 

Because the world has a sick sense of perfect timing, this is exactly when the back door snaps open, and Spock tumbles in with a gust of a wind, leaves in his hair and eyes wide. It’s the most emotion that McCoy has ever seen him display in his many years of knowing Uhura. 

“Spock?” Uhura asks, and she’s at his side at once, hands on his too-pale skin, and he looks past her, straight at McCoy with his black eyes, strange things that McCoy will never get used to. 

“Something in the woods wants you,” Spock says, and then he clears his throat, turning to Uhura and giving her a small smile. “I apologize for my entrance, I’ll clean up the mess.”

“Easily fixed,” Uhura says, returning his smile (although hers is much wider), and she flicks the leaves out the door and the door closed with a snap of her wrist. Spock stares at the door for a moment before turning back to McCoy. 

“A skinchanger,” Spock says. 

“Yeah, I figured,” McCoy mutters, taking a sip of the coffee. 

“He got into a fight with one,” Uhura says. 

“Hate my life,” McCoy says, and thinks about banging his head into the countertop again. 

“I don’t think that was a wise decision,” Spock says. 

McCoy pinches the bridge of his nose and squeezes his eyes shut. 

\---

The temperature takes a nosedive starting at sundown, and by the time McCoy drives home there are specks of snow falling in the beams of his headlights. He fiddles with the radio, and listens to the weather – just a few inches, it’ll blow through by morning. He won’t have a problem getting to the office in the morning. 

Uhura lives at the end of a road pretty deep in forested cover – she’s always been much more in tune with the ground and the sky, something McCoy is shit at but should really be better about – and he doesn’t see another car or living soul until he’s back on the main road, heading into their tiny, sleepy little town. Except for the stunning view of the Sierras across the flats and foothills, there is absolutely nothing that would put Mission Cedro on the map, most of all the fact that they’re over an hour from the closest mission. No one has any fucking clue where the name came from. 

He leaves his car in the increasingly cold parking lot and jogs to the front door of the old converted mill that now serves as apartments, relieved to see that no one is lurking around in the lobby being a busybody. His neighbors tend to either by earnest, young hipsters or old, paranoid hippies, and he doesn’t really get along with anyone. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the only person on the planet he gets along with is Uhura, but still. It’s a rule: no fraternizing with the neighbors, lest they try to get you to work at Mammoth during the ski season or invade Area 51 with them. 

Nothing happens between the hours of nine at night and three in the morning. He eats. Watches a couple reruns of Mythbusters. Goes to bed. 

Gets woken up in the middle of the night by someone banging on his window. 

“Jesus fuck-“ He comes up with a palm at the window, sparks sneaking up his fingers and warmth across his skin. The person on the other side of the window, who is in a _goddamn tree_ , scoots back, but the flash of blue eyes gives it away. 

He was really, really hoping that life would see fit to deal with this skinchanger thing in the morning. Or even better, tomorrow after business hours. His Friday nights are always open, considering he’s single and a cantankerous bastard. 

Sighing tightly through his nose, he throws off the covers and gets up, padding across the wood floor to the window. There is snow blanketing the ground and tree limbs, and it’s even collecting in the skinchanger’s hair. He’s at least put clothes on, some worn outfit that looks like it’s gone a few rounds with a construction site. 

“I’m not letting you in,” McCoy says, knowing that the man can hear him through the glass. 

“You have something of mine,” he fires back, and his voice is less growly and more round than McCoy had expected. There’s something golden about his words, sharp and smooth at the same time. Joce had sounded similar once, although she had started fading to steel near the end of everything. 

“Yeah, well you took a chunk out of me earlier,” McCoy says.

“You look amazingly fine for that.”

He’s right. The ointment had worked as well as it was supposed to, and then McCoy had done the rest of the work after dinner, when the last of the fire had slipped from his body. 

“You gonna attack me again?”

“No.”

“I have a hard time believing that.”

The skinchanger sighs, and his shoulders slump a little. McCoy can’t tell in the dim light, but he’d bet money on the man being pretty young, maybe early 20’s, and he looks younger in his slump, despite the fact that he’s perched on the tree branch like a cat. 

McCoy’s always been a sucker for cats up trees, even if they’ve taken a swipe at him. With a sigh, he unlocks the window, and the man dumps himself through it the minute McCoy hauls it open, coming in with a blast of cold air and a flurry of snow. McCoy slams the window shut and then turns to face the man, sparks glowing in his palms again. He trusts the man as far as he can throw him. 

“You know that really fuckin’ hurts?” he asks, waving at McCoy’s hands. “Keep those to yourself, I promise I’m not going to attack you.”

“Insurance,” McCoy says, and watches as the man slinks around the room, finally stopping in front of where McCoy had thrown his jacket on the chair in the room. He kneels down, and, almost reverently, pulls the cording out of one of the front pockets. McCoy had thought it was a necklace, but the man wraps it around his wrist a few times instead, tying it with clever fingers and sharp teeth like he’s done it a million times before – which he probably has. 

Something leeches out of his body at that, and the little sigh he lets out is pleased. 

“Out, kitty cat,” McCoy says, pointing to the window. 

“What, you don’t have a door?” he asks, standing up, looking over his shoulder at McCoy. 

“You didn’t see fit to use it the first time.”

They have a stare-off for a moment before McCoy sighs, and ends up leading him to the front door instead. 

“Hey,” he says as he’s about to leave, turning back to McCoy for a moment. “You got a name?”

“Why do you care?”

“Names matter to me.” A shrug. 

“Name magic is folklore, kid.”

“Didn’t say it wasn’t, just said that they matter. If it helps, I’m Jim.”

Heartbeats stretch out into moments before McCoy finally answers. 

“Len McCoy. Out.”

Jim goes, although he might be smiling as the door shuts behind him. It doesn’t sit right with McCoy, and he spends hours trying to get back to sleep. 

\---

McCoy’s only one of two doctors who staff the little office on the main street through town, so as much as he wants to stay in bed after he’s beaten his alarm clock into submission, he knows he has to get up. He rolls over to the edge of the bed, catching himself on cold feet on a cold floor, and find himself outside half an hour later, tromping through six inches of unplowed snow the whole three blocks it takes to get to the office. 

He’s there before Chapel or M’Benga, and he frowns when he sees someone has left a note on the door. When he gets close enough he sees that it’s in Chapel’s looping handwriting –

_Running Charles French into Modesto, slipped early this morning, afraid his hip is broken._

McCoy sighs, opening the door (his hands shaking in the cold, breath thick steam in front of his face), and is at least glad that Chapel was the one to get to Charles first. McCoy hates driving, and M’Benga follows the rules of the road to a letter, but the fact is that the closest hospital is an hour away and in that case, you want Chapel driving you into Modesto. She might be the only former teen champ rally driver working as a nurse in all of Central California. 

He putters around, shedding layers and turning on lights, and then, in the absence of Chapel, goes to flip through the appointment book. He’s debating pulling the supplies for his 9am (new family, kid starting a new school, needs a couple of boosters) when the bell over the door jingles and he looks up into what are becoming a disturbingly familiar set of bright blue eyes. 

“Oh no-“ he starts, but stops when he sees that Jim is supporting a second person, her red hair in tangles and a goddamn _arrow_ sticking through her upper arm, staining her orange jacket red. 

“Hunters,” Jim says, and the girl looks up, pain hard and pinched around her eyes as McCoy comes to her side, scissors in one hand so that he can carefully work away the jacket. The arrow is cleanly through the soft flesh halfway between elbow and shoulder, and although it’s bleeding sluggishly, it doesn’t look like it’s hurt anything incredibly important. 

McCoy can see that it’s a broadhead on a carbon fiber shaft, definitely from a hunter. He frowns, helping the girl sit down. 

“Bastards,” McCoy says, biting into his words. “This is for big game, we’re outside the hunting season.”

“Uh,” Jim says, bites his lip. “Not that kind of hunter.”

McCoy looks up at him, confused, and Jim just looks past him, at the girl. Right, first priority. 

“What’s your name, darling?” he asks as he takes a second, careful look at the entry wound. 

“Gaila,” she says, voice small and shot through with sharp pain, dark grey. He can see traces of a beautiful sunset of colors under it – orange, red, yellow – but right now it’s choked under a storm cloud. And, under that – there. This will be easy, he can feel an animal under her skin, buried deep by the pain, and the gorgeous, deep red feather that she’s wearing as a hair clip answers that question for him. You’re not supposed to use magic on humans. Luckily, Gaila seems to be another skinchanger. 

“Alright, Gaila, let’s see what we can do for that.” He steps back, and Jim carefully picks her up, following McCoy to a room in the back, where Jim eases her down onto one of the exam beds, her one shoulder slightly off. 

“Should I-“ Jim starts, but McCoy shakes his head. 

“No, I need you to support her elbow,” he says, and Jim just nods, carefully cradling Gaila’s elbow, smiling at her. 

“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” Gaila asks. 

“A bit,” McCoy admits, and then, palms warm and sparking, snaps the shaft in front of her arm, pulling out both halves out clean and fast, and Gaila sucks in a breath, the sound spiking with steel-colored pain. Blood falls with the shaft, free to slide down her arm and onto the floor, but McCoy stops it with a hand over entry and exit, eyes closed. 

The first time he’d done this, he’d been a child and had no idea what he’d been doing. A bird had slammed into his bedroom window, and he’d run down into the garden to find it below the window, dragging a bent wing through the grass and calling wildly. He thought he’d just been fast when he had gotten his hands on it, but he knows now that he was probably calling it to some degree. The wing had mended under McCoy’s touch in a heartbeat, and the bird had burst from his clasped hands, tiny heart slamming out a staccato beat, and he’d watched it shoot off like a star. 

He’d remembered that feeling for a long time, the warmth in his body, energy replaced with weariness, but an amazing sense of simple calm and joy. That’s how the woman with the green voice had known, she’d said, because only true healers felt joy as they took other’s pain. 

Now, Gaila’s skin is warm under his own, and he narrows his world down to her arm, knitting and stitching things back together, paying attention to her pulse and breathing as they rise and fall under his fingers. It does tire him out – not like yesterday with Jim, because he uses this kind of thing all the time – but he’s calm when he pulls back, and Gaila is staring between her arm and his eyes, her lips parted. 

“You didn’t tell me he was a magic user,” Gaila breathes, looking up at Jim, who just shrugs, although he’s rubbing a thumb into her elbow, protective and soothing. McCoy turns to the sink to scrub his hands as Gaila sits up, the paper on the exam bed crackling under her. 

“You said they weren’t normal hunters?” McCoy asks when he turns back around, Gaila hopping down, and he doesn’t miss the way she keeps flexing her arm in awe. 

“Werewolf hunters,” Jim sighs, lips a tight line. “They have to be stupid-ass ones to think that we’re werewolves though.” McCoy’s inclined to agree, especially considering he’s figured out where he’s seen the red of Gaila’s feather before – she’s a red-tailed hawk. It’s a little hard to mix up a wolf and a hawk. 

“We don’t even have werewolves up here,” McCoy says. He’d know if there were, could feel them at the back of his mind. 

“A pack moved in an hour north,” Gaila says. “And brought trouble, evidently.”

“Werewolves _always_ bring trouble,” Jim says. McCoy doesn’t respond, just takes them up to the front as M’Benga is leading McCoy’s 9 o’clock back. 

“Uh, use room two,” McCoy tells him, and although M’Benga raises an eyebrow, he just nods. He’s one of the few humans who know about McCoy, and therefore isn’t that shocked when he comes in to find that there’s blood and god knows what else smeared across the floor. McCoy’s saved more than one bleeder in his life, even though it means he’s got to reveal what he is. He’d much rather have that then have the feeling of letting someone die on his conscience. 

“Thank you,” Jim says at the door, and McCoy just nods. 

“Stay in one piece,” he tells them both, and Gaila smiles, stands on her tip-toes to press a kiss to his cheek, and then they’re gone, out into the cold. 

\---

“How’s your skinchanger problem progressing?” Uhura asks as she sits down on the couch next to him, a cup of coffee clutched protectively between her palms. A pervasive chill has settled on the world with the snow, and they’re all starting to feel it. Even Spock had made a comment about it the other day. 

“Haven’t seen him in a week,” McCoy responds, looking up from reading the news on Uhura’s tablet. The last he’d seen of Jim and Gaila had been them leaving the clinic, although he can still feel them on the edges of his senses, ranging further and further each day. 

“So you’re just keeping his talisman?”

“What? No – no, that’d be stupid. He showed up to get it back the day everything happened. Or rather, very early the next morning. Probably just to wake me up.”

“He just showed up at your door?”

“Window, actually.”

Uhura raises an eyebrow, and McCoy gets the distinct impression that she’s trying very hard not to laugh. McCoy knows the whole thing is beyond ridiculous, and he just sighs, taking a sip of his own coffee. They lapse into silence and Uhura turns on the TV, the sound of the news filling up the space.

“Oh – we’ve got werewolves, as well,” McCoy says after a while, looking up from where he’s switched to playing Fruit Ninja.

“What?” Uhura looks up sharply. “We’d feel them.”

“The skinchangers – and there are two of those, as well – said that a pack had moved in an hour north.”

“Excellent,” Uhura says, voice dry. “Because what we needed was more trouble.” 

McCoy just snorts out a laugh in response, and Uhura shakes her head, although there’s a smile hovering around the corners of her lips. 

“I don’t think they’d come down here,” McCoy says.

“No, there’s no reason to. Especially if we have our very own skinchangers.”

“Aren’t we just the luckiest.”

“Your sarcasm is going to kill someone one day.”

“Yeah, probably me.”

Uhura smiles softly, and she reaches over to link their fingers together. McCoy sighs, looking up at her. There is warmth beneath her skin, and he can feel it snaking through their clasped hands, curling across blood and muscle and bone. Uhura has always run hot with the flame that flickers somewhere in her mind. 

_You don’t have to always wear your armor._

_It’s easier._

When he’d left that first coven, the one that had swept him up when he’d gone off to college, too early and too raw, they’d told him that he’d be alone forever, that his power would destroy him, that you had to feed off of and feed into someone else. You’d warp yourself, existing alone with magic in your hands. 

That coven, run by the broken woman with the green voice choked with iron, had been wrong. Uhura had been wandering as much as he had, and they fit together perfectly, opposites, and there is warmth in her palms and coolness in his. 

_Stop thinking so hard._ Even in their minds Uhura is a sharp, brilliant red that dances and skips across any surface her voice can reach. 

He is aware that he’s smiling, because he can see it in Uhura’s mind, feel the reverb. The next time he’s aware of the world it’s dark and Uhura is asleep in his arms, his body shoved into one corner of the couch and Uhura’s long legs taking up the rest. 

He groans, cracking his neck, and when he opens his eyes he finds Spock sitting cross-legged on the coffee table, watching them curiously. 

“Time issit?” McCoy asks, clearing his throat. 

“Four minutes past six in the evening,” Spock says, because he always knows. 

“Ugh, shit – I should get home,” he groans, and carefully scoots out from under Uhura, leaving her curled up on the grey cushions. He pops out his spine as Spock carefully lays a blanket over Uhura, brushing her hair out of her face and bending to press a kiss to her forehead. She stirs at that for a moment, and when she sighs, there is music in her voice. 

“I’m right here,” Spock whispers, and McCoy leaves them alone, Spock stroking her hair and listening to her mumbling a song that bound Spock to the earth and a body many years ago. 

\---

_The wind is hot, blowing off of the flats, up into the foothills, and he stands on soft feet on the rough ground, pine needles thick under his calluses. Somewhere he can hear crows, and then, beyond that, he can feel her, circling high overhead._

_“Gaila,” he says, closes his eyes and smiles. “Stop scaring the crows.”_

_Someone laughs, somewhere, around him and in him, because the wind will always carry their voices together._

_The lone hawk in the sky suddenly goes from flying horizontally to diving vertically, and heartbeats later Gaila slams into the ground, dress settling around her in the dry needles as she stands up, last crown of feathers fading from her hair and talons turning to freshly painted red nails. Her eyes stay amber though, right until she’s inches from him, and as she reaches for him she blinks, smiles at him with green eyes, and he laughs, twisting his body around, hitting the ground on all fours._

_He’s known this since he was old enough to, since his mother had handed him a strange trinket and he’d learned to run, and it feels like home as he powers through the forest, human slipping away and puma taking over._

_Gaila matches his speed, tips of her wings splayed and tipped up, featherfingers searching for the currents in the air, and he knows these trees, this earth, and the hawk above his body. Knows that -_

McCoy wakes up wide-eyed and gasping, staring at his bedroom wall, his hair matted to his forehead with sweat. 

“Shit,” he mumbles, stumbling up and out of bed, and he sits on the cool floor, palms flat on the wood as he grounds and anchors himself. He lets out a long breath, and then pushes, blue-white sparks dancing and skipping across the floor. He’d been expecting dreams of Gaila’s memories - that’s happened to him before after he’s worked on someone - but those had never come, and now instead he’s got Jim’s memories in his head. 

He drains them all out with his sparks, until he feels like a cornhusk, his head hanging between his arms, shoulders hunched. 

He doesn’t like feeling outside himself, and all he wants right now is to be empty of everything but his own mind. His hands are shaking when he finally raises them, putting them on his knees instead, his palms cool against his warm skin. 

Realistically, he knows he shouldn’t be doing this. He’d done it no small numbers of times after his father had died, but when the coven had found out they’d given him an earful. Some of them hadn’t even known that you could drain your own power fully, because no one had told them. It was something old and unknown, and by their opinion no witch should be giving up something so important of their own volition. 

Still, he’s not worried. He’s fairly sure that no one’s going to come crashing through his wall to attack him, and he’s always been pretty crap at that kind of magic anyway. Magic for him was always about protecting other people, not himself. 

Jim’s talisman screwed up him pretty royally, seemingly. He squeezes his eyes shut, trying not to think about it. Near the end he’d had too many of Joce’s memories in his head from trying to take away some of the mercury in her voice. She’d had a gorgeous voice when they’d first met, a sharp shade of bright green that popped when she laughed. The day the divorce papers had appeared, her voice had lost all of its color, nothing but tricky, swirling silver, impossible to ever pin down. 

He finds himself idly wondering what she sounds like now as he stands up (now that she’s found someone new, someone not him), whole body shaking, and collapses into bed again, curling up in a cocoon of covers and blankets. 

When he falls asleep though, he’s thinking of the gold and amber, that copper underlay, that make up Jim’s voice. 

\---

It’s another week before McCoy starts feeling the skinchangers moving back in towards Mission Cedro, but he ignores them, figuring that they’ve just come back for a few days. From what he’s read, skinchangers aren’t particularly adept at blending into towns and cities, preferring to exist in less traveled areas. 

None of this explains why he finds a cat up his tree again one night. 

He can feel Jim creeping closer through the night, until finally McCoy’s aware of his heartbeat outside the window in the loft. He sighs, finishes cleaning up dinner, and then takes the ladder up to his room, cracking open the door to find Jim sitting in the tree that’d he’d been in weeks before.

McCoy stands staring through the window, hands on his hips, and glares out at Jim. He’s sitting with his back to the trunk, hands behind his head, and a giant grin on his face. 

“No,” McCoy says loudly, and Jim pulls a pout. With a startling amount of grace he crouches and creeps across the branch, so that he’s hunkered down on the end of it, inches from the glass. 

“It’s cold,” Jim says, voice muffled through the glass. “Not gonna let me in?”

“Get lost, pussy cat.”

“You know there’s probably a joke in there-“

“Would you prefer kitty? Actually, no, I like fleabag. That’s a good one.”

Jim actually looks slightly insulted that McCoy would ever think he had fleas. He huffs out a breath, steam in the cold air, and McCoy sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. Against his better judgment he unlocks the window and hefts it open so that Jim can clamber through. 

“I prefer Jim,” he says, once the window is closed. 

“What are you doing here?” McCoy asks, tired and unwilling to play verbal ball with an infant skinchanger. 

“I was in the neighborhood,” Jim says easily, moving past McCoy to sit down on the end of his bed. 

“Bullshit.”

Jim fidgets for a moment before licking his lips and looking McCoy dead in the eyes. 

“You left a trace on my talisman,” Jim says, and his voice is even, strong, gold and steel. “And now I’m having dreams where I’ve got something like synesthesia -“

Jim stalls, makes a frustrated sound that sounds too animal to be fully human, and then raises a hand to bob it through the air, like he’s skipping it across an air current, fingers pressed together and palm flat. 

“It’s not synesthesia,” McCoy says, because he’s suddenly aware of exactly what Jim was experiencing in his dreams, if they were of McCoy’s memories. “Or, not quite. It’s not neurological, it’s how my power manifests.”

“You see everyone’s speech in color all the damn time?”

“Have since I was a kid. You get used to it.”

“I’d go nuts,” Jim huffs. “And I think it might actually be driving me nuts. I’m developing an adverse reaction to the color green, which is bad, because there’s a lot of it around here.”

McCoy can’t help it, Jim’s look of utter hatred at the mention of green startles a laugh out of him. 

“It’ll pass,” McCoy says. He’s had two more dreams of Jim’s memories since the first one, but they’re softer each time, made less of the real world and more of smoke and shards. 

Jim flops back on the bed, and McCoy watches the rise and fall of his chest for a few moments before Jim twists so that he can look up at McCoy. 

“What color is my voice?” 

McCoy opens his mouth to respond, but the words stall in his throat. He’s only ever told two people directly what color he hears from them: Joce and Uhura. It seems strangely intimate, something that he doesn’t let go of willingly. 

“Yellow,” he says finally. _Gold, copper, amber, but mostly bright, bright gold, the color of a brand new sun and a trickster’s eyes_. 

“Lame,” Jim says, and sits back up. “You promise this won’t last?”

“It won’t, don’t worry.” 

Jim stands up, and he’s crossing to the window when he stops, turning back to McCoy. 

“Your memories don’t have your own voice in them.”

“Blue.” _Almost the same color as your eyes._

“You’re answering all of these like they’re one simple color,” Jim says, sounds almost surprised. “But in your memories it’s a bunch of different colors, all twisted together.”

Jim’s looking at him like something inside him is broken, weighed down under everything he’s gotten from McCoy, and McCoy is suddenly aware what green memory he must have. 

“Emerald and jade, and rough iron under it, and when she yelled it sent coal sparks into the air,” McCoy says. “When I left the coven she told me that I’d waste away to nothing and her voice wasn’t black but it was-“

“Colorless,” Jim supplies, breathless. “You don’t hear me as just yellow.”

“Bright gold,” McCoy says, and his voice is tight. He’s suddenly aware of the space between them, just a foot or two, and that Jim’s voice has lost the steel under it, and that this might be the first time that he hasn’t sounded like he’s in pain since they crashed into each other weeks ago. 

Jim closes the distance between them, and his hands are on McCoy’s shoulders, neck, the sides of his head, and his lips are so, _so_ warm, liquid metal. McCoy shoves his hands up under Jim’s jacket and shirt, palms pressed to the smooth expanse of his skin, and he tries to splay his fingers as wide as possible, needing all that warmth under his hands. 

Jim walks them towards the bed, and nearly falls on top of McCoy in a haste to get as many articles of clothing off of him at once. 

“Let me-“ McCoy huffs, the edge of a laugh, and gets his sweater and t-shirt off as fast as possible. 

“How many layers does one person need,” Jim growls before sucking an open-mouthed kiss into the juncture of McCoy’s neck and shoulder, making him arch up into Jim. 

“It’s cold,” McCoy says, working at Jim’s belt as Jim strips out of his jacket and shirt, tosses them somewhere without taking his eyes off of McCoy. 

“We can fix that,” Jim says, and then scoots them up the bed, McCoy kicking at his pants to try to get them off. Jim reaches for him, hands roaming over his chest, following his fingers with his lips, making McCoy’s breathing rough, his head tipping back. 

McCoy doesn’t have a great reason for doing this. Somehow, he also doesn’t give a single fuck, because Jim is so warm, over him and around him, and he anchors himself with his hands on Jim’s hips, feeling the ebb and flow of his blood just under the thin skin, tracing bone and tendon. He doesn’t even realize he’s done anything until Jim pulls back with a surprised little breath, his eyes wide.

“What-“ Jim looks down at his hips and McCoy follows his line of sight before suddenly pulling his hands back. His palms are glowing. 

“Shit, I’m sorry,” McCoy breathes, letting his hands fall to the rumpled sheets. 

“Don’t apologize,” Jim says, ducking back in to suck at McCoy’s bottom lip, and when he rocks their hips together McCoy loses all train of coherent though, his hands back on Jim’s hips. “Doesn’t feel bad, just – interesting.”

McCoy’s not sure if that’s good or not, but Jim grinds down again, and whatever he was going to respond with dies in a strangled moan. 

“You need-“ McCoy digs his fingers into Jim’s skin “-to fuck me before I lose my mind.”

“Holy fuck, ok, sure, I can do that-“ Jim says, mouth hanging slightly open, “I can _so_ do that-“

Jim keeps rolling their hips together, so when he presses two fingers to McCoy’s mouth he’s more than happy to part his lips, lick around Jim’s fingers, and he smirks a bit when he sucks and Jim looks like something has gone and broken his brain. He wears every last one of his emotions on his sleeve, across his face, above his skin, and it means that right now the look on his face is doing things to McCoy. 

Spit’s maybe not the best, but when Jim eases a first finger in McCoy welcomes the burn, arching his hips off the bed. Jim holds him up with spread thighs, fucking into McCoy with long, clever fingers, and McCoy hooks his hands around Jim’s legs, pulling his body further down onto Jim’s fingers, lightheaded and breathy and feeling the heat of a new sun crawling across his skin. When Jim has to pull back to find his jeans for a condom, McCoy actually _whines_ , and he’d be embarrassed if he weren’t so single-mindedly trying to get fucked. 

“This is going to hurt,” Jim says, and McCoy braces himself up on shaking elbows to watch Jim roll on the condom and stroke himself, smearing spit down his shaft, and McCoy has to close his eyes to not come on the spot. 

“’s fine,” McCoy promises him, and he honestly means it, because he’s so used to running cold that he loves any burn he can get. 

“You sure?” Jim asks, and McCoy just nods, pushes himself the rest of the way up so that he can kneel over Jim, and he can still see traces of glowing blue around the sides of his hands as he lowers his body down onto Jim, and _god_ the edge of pain-pleasure he’s teetering on clears his mind, takes everything out, so it’s just Jim, everywhere, in him, and when Jim snaps his hips up it gets a long, broken gasp out of McCoy. 

“Move,” he breathes, and Jim doesn’t need to be told twice, gets his hips rolling in a way that forces the breath from McCoy, and they fall back, McCoy with his arms around Jim’s neck as Jim fucks him in rolling, shattering thrusts, spilling kisses and mumbled words across McCoy’s shoulders and neck. The leather and bone of his talisman brush across McCoy’s skin where he’s holding McCoy by the hips, and McCoy can feel raw power in it with each pass across his body. 

When Jim wraps a hand around him McCoy can’t help the _Jim Jim Jim_ that falls from his lips, in between gasps and moans, and his own orgasm almost takes him by surprise, curling heat that suddenly has him coming, and he can feel his own heartbeat between Jim’s, Jim’s quicker than his because he runs hot and fast and something a little to the side of human. 

“You’re gorgeous, god, yeah, come for me-“ _lines of gold, twisting threads, so,_ so _bright_. 

McCoy holds onto Jim as he rides his own orgasm out, mouthing at McCoy’s collarbone as his rhythm stutters, and he finally stills. Their breathing is loud, the only sound in the room, and when Jim finally rolls off of him McCoy instantly misses the heat, and reaches out for Jim without thinking, floating somewhere half in his mind and half in the real world. 

“Whoa,” Jim says, scooting to curve around McCoy’s body, and he picks up one of McCoy’s hands, tracing his fingers with his own. 

“Yeah, that happens,” McCoy murmurs when he cracks open an eye to see that Jim is watching the sparks that are lazily twirling up around his fingers, vanishing into the cool air. “It’ll stop.”

“I’ve never seen that happen to anyone before,” Jim says, transfixed, and McCoy smiles, lazily. 

“We’ve all got our power centers somewhere different, mine’s in my metacarpals and phalanges.”

“You could just say hands.”

“Boring. Also, doctor, plus hands implies other things besides bone.”

Jim smiles at him, something clear and impish, and he scoots in closer to press his forehead to the side of McCoy’s head, breathing against his skin. 

“You’re made of sparks,” Jim whispers, and McCoy rolls up onto his side to get closer to the radiating starlight under Jim’s skin. 

\---

_A ruined city – no, ghost town – no one’s here, left long ago. Sky’s dark, buildings are dark, and there are glowing eyes in a window and they dart around –_

_(Dripping smoke, collecting in puddles of memory.)_

_It’s morning and he blinks at himself in the mirror, yellow-green eyes back to blue, back and forth, back and forth, and his mother is calling his name and she –_

_Night, after dinner, back to a town with no ghosts, no souls, and he stands on what was once main street and he can feel his muscles, bones, skin, shifting into something new and –_

_(Rising rain, pressing up into the dark where there was once knowledge.)_

_Grey sky, glowing eyes. His own are blue, except for when –_

He doesn’t snap awake this time, becomes aware of everything gradually. He breathes out through his nose, and there in sunlight through his eyelids. He rolls over with a breathy little groan and find himself with his nose pressed into short hair and smooth skin. 

Jim. He’d gone and jumped into bed with Jim. Somewhere, Uhura is laughing at him. He rolls back and presses a hand to his face with a grimace, aware of aching muscles and the fact that he really needs a shower. Jim’s heartbeat is even, his mind quiet in sleep, somewhere between REM and wakefulness, and so he drags himself out of bed, cracking various joints and trying to ignore the fact that he’d fallen asleep without cleaning up. 

He stands under the spray with his head hanging, wondering what to do with this. He and Jim hadn’t had the best first meeting (understatement), but since then they’ve been getting on all right. Seemingly getting on _great_ , considering McCoy had practically pulled a ‘tripped and fell on his dick’ moment last night. 

(Uhura is _so_ laughing somewhere.)

Logically, Jim was good looking, and had the all important characteristic of not freaking out when random parts of McCoy started sparking and glowing during sex. He should have better control, he really should, but at this point it’s not exactly worth it to try. He’s getting too old to be dealing with shit like this. 

Against his better judgment, he likes Jim. Hell, he’s _attracted_ to Jim. McCoy’s willing to bet that it’s got a lot to do with his voice – some people talk and it goes right past or through McCoy. A select few talk and it curls around both the speaker and McCoy, ties them together with cording made of color and metals. Joce had that once. Uhura does. Spock has some weird undead version of it.

Jim certainly does. McCoy wonders sometimes if he could reach out and wrap Jim’s voice around his fingers. 

“Bones?”

Speak of the devil. It’s copper this early in the morning, rough and round. 

“In relation to what?” McCoy asks, leaning to pull the shower curtain back. He’s treated to the sight of a very naked Jim, standing in the door and backlit by the early morning sun. 

“You,” Jim says, and he pads over, stops in front of McCoy. “Wanna let me in?”

“Bones?” He prompts.

Jim reaches out and runs his thumb down Bones’ pointer finger where his hand is pressed to the shower wall. Bones just frowns, and wonders if Jim has lost his mind sometime during the night. 

“I may or may not have a fanatical need to nickname everything in my life,” Jim says, and he follows it up with a bit of a shrug and a small smile. “But seriously, shower? We can have shower sex, even.”

“I’m trying to get the sex off, presently,” McCoy says, but he does step aside for Jim. 

“Oh no,” Jim says, and his small smile has become a wide smirk. “Trying to get things off, huh?”

“Goddamit,” McCoy sighs, dropping his head into his hand, but he’s smiling, and he doesn’t stop Jim when he slips his arms around McCoy’s waist, smiling into his shoulder. 

\---

Uhura’s in San Francisco for the week for work, so McCoy ends up as Spock’s best friend for the time being. He’d been cut off from the corporeal world for so long that if he goes too long without human contact he gets a bit twitchy. 

“I’m not particularly attached to this weather,” Spock says, ducking further into the collar of his coat. The snow is long melted, and they haven’t gotten any more, but the woods are still cold, the ground covered with slick, dead leaves. 

“It’s kinda miserable,” McCoy says, his breath steaming in the air. “Especially if you’ve noticed it.”

“It seems that my body temperature has been rising,” Spock says, and then stops suddenly to take a hand out of his pocket and hold it up for McCoy to see. There is red at the tips of his fingers. 

“That’s unsettling,” McCoy mutters. 

“I suppose it’s time to bring it up with Nyota when she returns.”

“That’ll be a fun conversation.”

“I’m not sure how exactly to broach the topic that I seem to be becoming… human.”

McCoy just raises an eyebrow, and Spock sighs before putting his hands back in his pockets. They walk on, heading for a pond that’s about half a mile away, and McCoy snaps his lighter on and off, pulling at the flame and then sending it back. He’s attempting to stop smoking again, but it means he seems to have developed a few nervous lighter ticks. 

“I think the skinchanger might be following us,” Spock says after a while, and McCoy just nods, slipping his lighter back into his pocket. He’d felt Jim starting a few minutes back, taking his time to stalk through the forest. 

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

“The last I heard of it, you two were, uh, at odds.”

“Understatement.”

“Mauling each other?”

“He was the one doing the mauling, thank you very much. But it’s fine. We’re good. Or something.”

“Of course.”

Jim finally makes an appearance when they’ve made it to the pond. They’re having a competition to skip stones over the half-ice water when Jim slinks out of the woods and climbs up a tree on the bank, sitting on his haunches, tail flicking. 

“Caught up a tree again, kitten?” McCoy calls, and out of the corner of his eye he can see Spock’s eyebrow arch up. 

“I may need help getting down,” Jim says, and when McCoy looks back again Jim is sitting on the same branch, and swinging his very human feet instead of twitching his tail, grinning. 

“Well, it’s too bad there’s no one here with a ladder,” McCoy says. “Spock, that’s Jim. Jim, Spock.”

“Sorry I spooked you that first time we passed each other,” Jim says. 

“It’s fine,” Spock says mildly. “You’re not the most worrisome thing I’ve come across in my travels.”

“Ah, uh, good?” Jim says, although he looks like he might take a bit of offence at not being the worst thing Spock has met. 

“I’ll leave you two to it,” Spock says, and before McCoy can stop him he’s gone, the wind kicking up the leaves before settling again.

“That’s a bit weird,” Jim says, slipping from the tree and hitting the ground with a dull thump.

“Yeah, he does that sometimes,” McCoy says as Jim crosses over towards him, taking one of the flat pebbles McCoy is holding and executing a perfect throw, the stone skipping four times before sinking into the icy water. “Show off.”

Jim just grins at him before he moves in, pressing a kiss to McCoy’s lips before pulling back. 

“Wanna get lunch?” Jim asks. 

“Sure,” McCoy says, and dumps the rest of the pebbles back on the bank before they start back. 

Jim talks idly as they walk, talking about a physics professor he had in college, his mom’s cooking, a new series he’d found on Netflix, and it’s only when Jim mentions his brother’s wedding that McCoy remembers something.

“Hey,” he says, “want to be my date to a wedding?”

“I – what?” Jim stops, and McCoy turns to him. 

“My ex-wife is getting remarried.”

“Soooo we’re crashing the wedding.”

“No, I have an invite.”

Jim’s eyebrows go up. “Well, I do have a pair of exceptionally well tailored suit pants that make my ass look even more fabulous than usual, so you can show up with total arm candy.”

“Very kind of you to volunteer your ass.”

“I can volunteer it for other things,” Jim says, and he’s straight up leering now. McCoy just sighs, rolling his eyes, although he can feel heat across his cheeks.

“Thanks for agreeing,” McCoy says, and when they start walking again Jim bumps their hips together, an open smile on his face. 

“Anything for you, Bones,” Jim says simply, and his voice is that cord of bright gold, something that McCoy can wrap around his fingers and hold, warmth across his skin and in his own smile.


End file.
